The euro-zone vision thing

The European Union was devised, in part, to put an end to Europe’s annoying habit of starting bloody and protracted wars in its own backyard.

Lord only knows what the bosses of the European Broadcasting Union were thinking when they dreamed up the Eurovision Song Contest. A series of manageable proxy wars fought with stilettos and big hair, perhaps.

To this observer, at least, the annual song-and-dance affair, which takes place for the 56th time on Saturday, in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, calls to mind a famously skeptical saying of Warren Buffett about gold:

Gold gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head.

Well let me tell you, Warren, gold would look, to the Mars set at any rate, very of-this-earth, very non-head-scratch-inducing, compared with the Eurovision Song Contest. I assure you.

And I say that as someone who has been attempting to chronicle and follow along with Europe’s other head-scratch-causing occasion from the bowels of a London news desk: the debt crisis, and with it will-it-or-won’t-it-exit Greece.

Still, on the face of it, Eurovision, which attracts about 125 million viewers each year, and is reportedly the world’s most watched non-sporting event on TV, is little more than a hyped-up forum for the region’s cache of national B-list talent: one glitzy, elaborately coiffed act per country; the public, in each participating nation (there are 26 finalists), votes; the winning group, and so nation, is accorded the “honor” of hosting next’s year’s even more kitschty extravaganza; and then we all go home. Until next time.

In fact, to the inadvertent spectator, to the casual visitor, say, who, in lamb-to-the-slaughter fashion, just happens to switch over on the wall-mounted TV while hunting for CNN in his or her hotel room, Eurovision probably looks like some jacked-up European game show where the razzmatazz format has been taken to its ultimate, 21st-century demonic conclusion. That’s Europe for you! Oh, look: It’s raining in Angola.

However, resist the urge to channel surf and you’ll see that the competition is about much more than that.

A little more, anyway.

This year’s Russian entry, for example, consists of eight grandmothers from what is said to be a remote village in the Urals. (Are there nonremote villages in the Ural Mountains?) They will perform a song about housework. In slippers.

The Romanian hopeful, meanwhile, is pegging its fortunes to bagpipes and flames.

The Azerbaijanis this year have been scolded for politicizing what is supposed to be an entirely unpolitical stage. The opulence-loving first family there headed by President Ilham Aliev, the hard-hitting investigative BBC program, Panorama, reported this week, has been using its hosting of the competition to its political advantage.

Whatever the case, the Azerbaijanis last year managed the dual trick of fielding an entry in a European competition and walking off with its top prize. My geography gets a bit hazy when it comes to the Caucasus region. I know Azerbaijan is at a compass-point crossroads and all that. But isn’t it part of Central Asia?

Britain, a perennial Eurovision loser in recent years despite its unmatched musical history (Beatles, Stones, Who, Oasis and so on down through Adele), is backing the veteran crooner, and improbably named, Engelbert Humperdinck. Rolls off the tongue like it will likely roll off the votes. Britannia last saw glory in 1997.

Moldova, at last year’s event, channelled Smurfs and unicycling.

For reasons known only to the Irish themselves, they keep fielding the identical twins John and Edward Grimes, known collectively as Jedward. They have, or did at one point have, very, very tall hair. That could be relevant.

The truth is, this competition, once you cut through all the baffling (although admirably creative) cultural fusion, is about politics. It’s about nationalism. It’s about patriotism. And it’s about regionalism.

And it probably always has been. The European Broadcasting Union, a few years older than the EU itself depending on where you draw that line, probably thought it had come up with a lighthearted and novel way of introducing a bit of common ground to the Continent.

Instead, what they have ended up with is as every bit as fractious as the EU’s economic and monetary pet project: the euro zone.

Small countries that unofficially vote en bloc and decide the fate of larger, more established players. Accusations of corruption. There is a longstanding conspiracy theory of uncertain provenance that Spain’s General Franco bribed television executives to secure a Spanish victory in the 1960s. Spain wasn’t part of the euro zone at that point of course.

Nevertheless, on Friday, there were reports that Spain’s current Eurovision contestant was half-hoping against a win for her debt-stricken country on the grounds that it would be too expensive to be next year’s host.

On the other hand, for what could be the first time ever, Turkey (non EU, non-euro zone) could be enticed to vote for its traditional foe Greece.

Greece, incidentally, took top honors in 2005 with a song called “My number one.”

It’s kind of been downhill ever since.

@khjelmgaard

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